Firefighting: https://www.powerdms.com/blog/women-in-the-fire-service/ Sanitation: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2019/08/27/breakin...
This took me literally 45 seconds of googling.
Why do you think there are fewer women who choose to study STEM?
Anecdotally, they often don't end up studying STEM subjects because they're encouraged to focus on other subjects in high school.
Definitely citation needed, there are countless "Women in STEM" initiatives, almost begging girls to go into STEM fields.
> What’s clear is that there’s a vicious circle of perception and reality in terms of gender imbalance. And that schools, universities and industry are failing to show young people – and especially girls – the realities of technology jobs and careers in today’s world.
> Despite such exciting opportunities, girls aren’t considering technology as a career – partly because nobody is putting it forward as a possible option. While 33% of male respondents say they’ve had a career in technology suggested to them, the figure for females is only 16% – a glaring lack of advice that’s helping to reinforce the stereotype of a male dominated industry.
So even this slide deck points to a difference in interests and aptitudes as a key driving factor in women focusing less on STEM careers.
Why are the authors of these slides not equally concerned with the under representation of men in health care?
> women are more involved with healthcare than men – accounting for 77% of NHS employees
Why are women under-represented in senior leadership positions in the NHS?
The question of men disproportionately filling higher level roles within organizations is a separate question, and seems to affect other industries in addition to technology.
So a lot of male interest in technology is self driven.
This is a slide deck trying to show women are being unfairly denied a technology career, but then goes on to give a lot of evidence most of the discrepancy is due to self selection.
"The present study makes several important contributions to the literature. First, it is the first comprehensive meta-analysis on sex differences in vocational interests. We synthesized evidence from interest inventories over four decades and found large sex differences in vocational interests, with men preferring working with things and women preferring working with people. These sex differences are remarkably consistent across age and over time, providing an exception to the generalization that only small sex differences exist. Second, this study provides a systematic review of the sex differences in the STEM interests that has not previously appeared in the literature. The pattern of sex differences in theSTEM interests revealed by the present study closely resembles the composition of men and women in corresponding occupations and contributes to the understanding of the gender disparity in theSTEM fields. The results suggest that the relatively low numbers of women in some fields of science and engineering may result from women’s preference for people-oriented careers over things-oriented careers"
I contend that there may still be some forces in some industries that try to subvert efforts at more women in them, but those are few and far between. With the gender earnings gap already proven to be bullshit (and if anything, in tech, women are getting paid more simply because companies want to fill diversity quotas), we need to stop wasting time fighting amongst ourselves and focusing effort on real, actual problems. Workers divided over petty shit like this is what the rich and powerful want.
You are a Misogynistic man.
/s
EDIT: if it's unclear, this refers to the immediate parent of this comment.
In fact, the reverse is true for younger women. Younger women make more money than younger men: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/29/women-in-20s-e...
edit: The updated link you provided tells average "weekly earning", not an hourly wage rate.
Incorrect. Many salary jobs pay for over-time (and again, men are more likely to work over-time, on average).
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gende...
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.p20161124
There have been a bunch of studies of this, and the conclusions are pretty consistent: women aren't paid less for doing equal work, they're paid less because they end up doing less or lower-paid work once they have children, because they do a disproportionate share of the childcare.
This should still be fixed, but it means the fix is mostly about what happens at home, not what happens at work, which is much more difficult.
Nobody said that. They never end up in the tech industry to begin with, because they're either dissuaded in high school, or they start and then leave because it's such a male-dominated environment
Any evidence for this claim? There are a lot of efforts to increase the number of women studying science and technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_education_in_STEM
And if that isn't enough, a quick search on the web found a number of published papers on the subject:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0071...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/194855061244073...
" to describe the potential influence..."
So no actual evidence of anything.
> https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-011-0051-0
"Stereotype Threat".
"A meta-analysis by Flore and Wicherts (2015) concluded that the average reported effect of stereotype threat is small, but also that the field may be inflated by publication bias. They argued that, correcting for this, the most likely true effect size is near zero.[19]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat#Criticism
The third reference wasn't available, so can't comment.
These types of "studies" tend to suffer from causal inversion, i.e. "wet roads cause rain", in arguing that the perception of these fields as male-dominated causes women to not enter them.
The simpler and more plausible explanation is stereotyp accuracy: people correctly perceive these fields as male-dominated because women tend to not enter them. That such a perception is an effective deterrent seems implausible given the many other fields that used to be completely male-dominated and are now female-dominated (for example veterinary medicine).
As a feminist, I also can't get on-board with a view of women as such delicate fragile flowers that such perceptions would prevent them from doing something they like, and it doesn't match the women in my life...but maybe I have been blessed with unusually non-delicate women, who knows?
Finally, who says it is female underrepresentation? Maybe it is male overrepresentation? And in fact, there is strong evidence that this is the case. Both men and women who score well in both verbal and math SATs tend to go into non-STEM fields. People who only do well in math tend to go into STEM fields, partly because they don't have a choice. And that group is largely male.
Yes, you have correctly identified the paper as a review on current theories.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat#Criticism
Yes, there is debate about these things, as there often is in the social sciences. This is from the same criticism section on wikipedia:
"In a 2009 meta-analysis, Gregory M. Walton and Steven J. Spencer argued that studies of stereotype threat may in fact systematically under-represent its effects, since such studies measure "only that portion of psychological threat that research has identified and remedied. To the extent that unidentified or unremedied psychological threats further undermine performance, the results underestimate the bias."[23] Despite these limitations, they found that efforts to mitigate stereotype threat significantly reduced group differences on high-stakes tests.[23]"
Please also note that nobody is claiming that stereotype threat is the only factor in STEM performance.
I'm no expert in the field either, and I welcome discussion. But I would prefer a better faith argument than copying the most "gotcha" paragraph from the criticism section of wikipedia.
If you could verbalize your skepticism more clearly I think this discussion would be more fruitful.
EDIT: I see you have edited your comment and added a lot. The above was my response to your first draft.
>As a feminist, I also can't get on-board with a view of women as such delicate fragile flowers that such perceptions would prevent them from doing something they like, and it doesn't match the women in my life...but maybe I have been blessed with unusually non-delicate women, who knows?
This feels especially in bad-faith. These are statistical effects, at society scale. Considering how clear the effectiveness of repeated messages is at a social level (e.g. marketing, religion, fake news, ideology), it should not surprise you that ideas of stereotypes influence people's behaviour. Humans fall for marketing as a society, are we all "delicate fragile flowers"?